


her eyes were open

by labonnemon



Category: Labyrinth (1986)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-03
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-01 06:01:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23466559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/labonnemon/pseuds/labonnemon
Summary: how does Jareth mourn? sadness becomes obsession after Sarah refuses Jareth for the last time. primarily Jareth with Hoggle, Ludo, and Sir Didymus.
Relationships: Jareth & Sarah Williams, Jareth/Sarah Williams
Comments: 4
Kudos: 31





	1. Six Years

**Author's Note:**

> this is the first chapter of a short story, no more than four or five chapters. despite what my other works might indicate, I plan to finish this one. enjoy <3

Jareth had been confused, that first night he was unable to call upon Sarah in her sleep. He had planned an especially elaborate scene for this evening, a replica of their brief time in that shimmering, swaying ballroom of long ago. If he couldn’t entice her back Underground with this dream, he wasn’t sure he would keep trying. Sarah had welcomed his nightly visions for six years, even as she refused each invitation to physically and permanently return to his realm. To what end her refusals tended, he knew not; he occasionally spied on her waking hours, and he had never found anything so compelling to keep her in the mortal world.

However little Jareth understood it, Sarah did love her life, quiet though it was. She designed and constructed costumes for a quirky theater troupe in Chicago, and had a small but cozy apartment of her own. She was able to frequently visit her family on the east coast, and watching her baby brother grow into a young man had proven to be a great joy. The irony was not lost on her that the desire to be a part of her brother’s life kept her away from Jareth and her beloved friends. But she would have greatly missed Toby, and a thousand gestures of devotion from her would-be king could not convince her otherwise. She had never been able to explain it to him, because Jareth had never asked her why. For all his passion and ageless life, he was not a very mature being. Fey creatures rarely are; their preternatural beauty and charisma have the power to gain them anything they might want. They have very little experience with disappointment.

It was Sarah’s seeming immunity to these charms, her ability to see past them and hold the belief that his wild world paled in comparison to the land of her birth, that intrigued Jareth. After her initial refusal, in the shattered stone and mortar of his castle, he had masked his confusion with rage. But over time, as he visited her and she continued to refuse his offers, his rage faded, and his confusion transformed to dedication, to pursuit and obsession. All that he felt fed his desire to win her submission and bring her to her rightful place in his world, at his side, as his queen. In all his visits to Sarah, he had never tried to understand her heart; he had only tried to make her see the greater value of his heart as he offered it.

For Sarah, the dreams were beautiful, they were nostalgic. She was able to see not only the man who loved her, but the friends she loved and sorely missed. She knew that, for them, these scenes were not visions; Jareth had made that quite clear. In some way, he drew her out of her mortal body and was able to give her physical form in the Underground for a few short hours each night. It was why she had always lived alone – she did not want another person around to intrude on any of these nights she spent in another world. She had never met another person who might make it worthwhile to give up those hours outside herself.

Sarah loved Jareth – she loved him for his beauty, his passionate dedication to her winning her heart, for his fierce and primal desire to possess her entirely. She learned to love even his ignorance of empathy and sympathy: she understood that neither characteristic was part of his natural state, and nothing in their hours together moved her to teach him. If she ever decided to truly be with him, there would be time enough.

And until that final, icy black night, she had always wondered when – not if – she would finally say yes.

__

He struggled in vain to call her for several minutes. He used all manner of magic; after his fifth failed summons, he tried a simple scry for her location. When he finally found her, the trace of her body was so weak he feared he might lose it. He used the last of his energy to take up his owl form and follow the magic to her.

What he found caused him to forget himself, and for a few brief moments, he was once more a man, falling fast toward the pavement, plummeting with heavy limbs to meet the tragedy laid out on the ground below him. He righted his form mere inches above the bare, spiny branches of the trees planted along the edges of the street. He perched himself in a branch as close as he could get without drawing attention from the several humans moving around. All of them paced between vehicles topped with flashing red and blue lights, all of them moved in haphazard orbit around a prone body in the middle of the road. The men wore uniforms, looking like toy soldiers to Jareth, and he knew immediately they were just as useless.

He couldn’t hear Sarah’s heartbeat. Her body, which mere seconds ago had still been alive enough for him to locate, could be sensed no longer. No cloud of breath rose from her mouth in the early winter air. Her dark eyes were wide open and empty. The street was black and covered with ice, and he could smell the blood. Her blood. Her long hair, spread around her face like a corona, covered the pool of crimson spilling from a crack in her fragile, mortal skull.

Even if he had wanted to transform himself, to magic her away to his world where his powers were more potent, where he might heal her, he could tell it was already of no use. Once in a great while, a body dies and the soul that leaves it does so with such speed that it is not be retrieved or stayed. Sarah had proven to be one such creature.

 _She must not have been afraid_ , he thought with wonder.

Later, his awe would fade. It would be replaced with anger over this final denial. He would come to see it not as bravery, but as the final insult: that after years of refusing to leave the mortal realm for his immortal one, she would so readily succumb to that final departure from her world and into nothingness.

But for now, he only knew that he could no longer contain his anguish. The owl gave a great, echoing screech before leaping toward the sky in a great flap of wings, feathers and dead leaves shaken away and left to drift down to the frozen ground, to that dark head of hair, the unmoving curled fingers of a pale hand. He crossed the border to the Underground without looking back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! I meant to update this story within a week of posting this first chapter, but then covid-19 forced some serious structural changes in my life, and then my kiddo and I both got sick! We’re still not 100% but I am finally back to working on the next few sections of the story. Thank you for the comments and hits and kudos so far <3


	2. The Garden at Dawn

Hoggle was watering a patch of dawn flowers when Jareth crossed over.

He quietly cursed the tall, golden-white flowers, then cursed whichever of his predecessors had originally planted them, and _then_ cursed that predecessor for likely breeding them before planting them en masse, as well. Such a finicky flower just couldn’t be a natural thing, Hoggle thought. Ain’t no way such needy blossoms would survive without somebody to care for ‘em each day, the way he was forced to do with these. They had to be watered at dawn, every day, or the petals would turn gray and curl up like the legs of dead spiders. It meant getting up before dawn, every day, to visit the well, and then stop at all the king’s garden beds before the sun crested over the Sharp Mountains.

In one of her early visits, before she was entirely grown up, Sarah had found the blooms on a hike up one of Ludo’s favorite mountains directly east of the castle, where it stretched up and rose to the clouds. The foothills began just two score miles from the edge of the Goblin City, and when Sarah wasn’t spending her secret hours in the castle, the mountains were her favorite place to go. When she came back from the hike with a wreath of the blossoms braided around her head like a crown, looking every inch the princess she once spent hours pretending to be, Jareth had immediately ordered the flowers planted everywhere in the castle gardens.

The memory of Sarah’s face framed by her black hair, windblown and wild from the gusts at the peak, how the radiance of the dawn flowers made her eyes shine, her smile — that was the only thing that kept Hoggle from ‘discovering’ a mysterious dawn flower blight that simply could not be cured or prevented.

As Hoggle moved from plot to plot, his thoughts of Sarah brought him back to a wiggling question he’d had since her visits began, about how her world and theirs had light and night cycles that were so fully inverted. It always seemed a little too convenient for Hoggle. It made her visits more interesting, to be sure, because they weren’t limited by darkness or the need for sleep; and he was sure that Jareth was working some kind of magic to make sure Sarah’s body was rested in her bed Aboveground. It was good and happy to show her the kingdom, to dine with her, to share so much of his world with her when he’d been so afraid she would leave after those thirteen hours and never come back.

But he also remembered how confused the land had been after Sarah refused Jareth’s offer and took Toby back to her world, how for weeks or months the hours and days had bled into each other, with sunlight that lasted three minutes and nighttimes that felt like they lasted three years. He remembered the feeling in the ground as he led the goblins in reconstructing the city and cleaning up the detritus from the battle, that strange hollow _push_ that came up to their feet from the dirt. They had all walked everywhere for days, nobody ran, for fear that light feet might let that push send them up and away from the earth that used to want nothing more than to pull them back down to her surface. Hoggle suspected that Sarah’s rejection had done some of it, because Jareth had so much invested in the space he built for her in their world; such a direct refusal of that space would result in cracks and breaks, it only made sense. Magic is magic, and magic is moody. But Hoggle began to suspect over time, especially once Sarah started visiting, that Jareth had done more to purposefully undo the world than she had done by accident, and that he had rebuilt it according to his whims, that he might see her, even going so far as to alter the sun, the moon and the stars.

These were his thoughts as he stood in the garden outside the king’s chambers, the only creature in the world allowed in this part of the castle, save Jareth himself. He looked eastward to the peaks of the Sharps, rubbing the small of his back with his gnarled fingertips, looking forward to getting another hour or two of sleep once he got back to his cottage.

The sun was just coming over the horizon, edging the mountains with red and orange fire like Hoggle hadn’t seen for two seasons or more. _Red sky at morning_ … His grandfather had been a sailor. Hoggle knew what this sunrise meant, and for a brief moment, he smiled a bit with thoughts of staying inside on a stormy day. Some nice tea, a fire, and several hours of reading sounded like a fine plan. His smile turned into a grin as he dumped the last contents of the watering can on the tan cobblestones of the courtyard, ready for the walk home across the grounds.

That was when he heard it, the crack that marked the barrier crossing between Underground and Above. It was unusually loud this morning. The sound reverberated through the sky and caused the line of fire over the mountains to quiver and _change_. Hoggle swore he saw the light of sunrise flare to darkest black in the moment between hearing the crack and turning his head upward to look for the owl he knew would be returning from the other world.

Except he saw no owl. What he saw was half man, half bird, not flying at all but tumbling inexorably down down down, ever closer to the spire of the northwest tower.

In the moment before Jareth was impaled on his own watchtower, the air squeezed, so thick for a moment that Hoggle could no longer breathe. As he clutched his throat, the Goblin King’s descent stopped mid-air, cushioned by forces that even Jareth could or would not later explain. To Hoggle, it felt like every bit of life in the Labyrinth flew from its home to that space of air between Jareth and the tip of the spire, and stopped his fall for just long enough. In the next instant, Hoggle could breathe again, and he saw Jareth’s chimeric form land on the slanted roof of the tower instead of the spire. He tumbled from the roof to the ground in a mass of limbs and feathers and shattered tiles, to the other side of the courtyard where Hoggle stood.

The little man forgot his watering can and ran halfway to the garden gate before catching himself. If Jareth was dead, he didn’t want to be the first to find out; but if he wasn’t dead, and he found out that Hoggle ran away from him in such a moment of abject need, well. There were punishments in the Labyrinth far worse than being tossed into the Bog of Eternal Stench.

Hoggle stopped and looked to the mountains as he caught his breath and readied himself to do whatever needed to be done. The line of fire along the mountaintops had widened and softened, the colors bleeding into the sky and the thin clouds of early morning. After a moment, he began to feel something tickling him from behind, like the shade of an itch in the throat right before a cough. The sensation increased as he turned, and he tried to cough it away, but he couldn’t. It kept growing in his ribs as he walked toward his king, until he could barely move with the intensity of that itching, aching feeling. When he reached Jareth, he saw the king’s eyes were open, staring into a space that only he could see, and his mouth was half open in some silent form of a grimace or moan. His hands were clutching his chest the same way that Hoggle was pressing his palms to his own.

Despite his own discomfort, Hoggle knelt down and pried the king’s hands apart, which revealed Jareth’s mysterious golden amulet underneath. Hoggle spread the collar of Jareth’s shirt to expose it to more light. The amulet was red with heat, and from where it was pressed against Jareth’s chest, red spider veins of magic spread out in a jagged map across his torso, up his neck and toward his shoulders. The amulet was practically fused to Jareth’s skin, pressed directly over his heart.

How long he stayed there with his hands on his master’s chest, staring at the silent screaming in Jareth’s face, Hoggle could never recall. But the sunlight’s portentous red had faded to citrus orange and buttery yellow by the time he moved again.

He had to find somebody to help him get Jareth indoors. Somebody he trusted.

He had to find Ludo.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi again and thank you all for reading! I apologize for the delay in updating this story, my original plan was to add a new chapter every week, but myself and my daughter have been sick for the last two weeks. We’re still on the mend, but today I finally felt well enough to focus on some writing. 
> 
> Please leave me your comments and thoughts! The next chapter is halfway drafted, so hopefully I’ll keep feeling better and you’ll have another update in a week. Stay safe and healthy my friends, and I hope the fanfic love is sustaining you in these weird times. <3


	3. The Voices

Ludo carried Jareth up the many steps to his bedchamber, at the northwestern corner of the suite of rooms where Jareth lived. Hoggle had to show him the way, for like the gardens, Jareth allowed only the dwarf and himself into the apartments. The goblins would steal anything that they liked – rather a bunch of magpies they were, at heart. Ludo’s size made it difficult for him to navigate the narrowing halls without jostling Jareth, prone in that strange silent agony in the beast’s arms.

The amulet was still impossibly hot and clearly doing something to Jareth’s body, but whether it was hurting his king or helping him, Hoggle wasn’t sure. He just knew that things would be so much easier if Jareth would just wake up and tell him what to do in the usual way. The tickle in his throat and the itching static in his chest grew in intensity as they walked. It was becoming hard to breathe. Hoggle could hear the wheezing breath coming from the king’s lips as he gently swayed in Ludo’s arms.

Halfway down the final hall from Jareth’s audience rooms to his chamber, the walls were too close together, and Ludo had to throw the king’s body over his shoulder. As his torso settled onto Ludo’s back, he gave a harsh cough followed by a desperate, crying gasp. “Ludo sowwy, sir,” Ludo rumbled, then almost immediately cried out, “Back hot! King burning!” and began to jog the final steps toward the bed. Jareth’s body bounced gently as Ludo moved, and the king coughed a few more times, but otherwise didn’t move or make a sound.

At the bed, Ludo moved to place Jareth down, and Hoggle dreaded the transition, and wished again that Jareth would wake up and save them from this confusion. “Just a little more, Ludo, good, okay now put your hand behind his head and lay him down, upsy-daisy, don’t drop ’im, else he’ll know and he’ll boil us both…” He sighed when Jareth’s head hit the pillow. The king still hadn’t fully transformed back to his usual form, and his skin bled where feathers poked out of it like needles on a cushion.

“Sir dying?” Ludo asked as quietly as he could, his shaggy head turned down to gaze at Hoggle’s leather cap. Hoggle still stared at Jareth, willing him awake. The amulet glowed on and the heat radiated gently over to them.

“I don’t know, Ludo,” Hoggle whispered the words. Deep down, he thought did know – but he didn’t want to be right. Jareth was still breathing, that shallow rasping pant up from his lungs through his mouth, and the veins of blood-red magic were stretching down his limbs and even more eerily, up his neck and inching across his face. His eyes were open, and the whites were slowly turning red with the magic that seemed determined to find its way through every vein and vessel in his body. It was one of the most grotesque sights Hoggle had ever witnessed, and it quickly became too much.

“Codswallop on this, I ain’t gonna just stand here doin’ nothin’, waiting for Jareth to die.” With the quickness of step that his small stature afforded him – an agility that always surprised Jareth – he skirted around to the other side of the bed and climbed in to kneel beside Jareth’s torso. “Ludo, prop ‘im up for me, keep his head steady.” He knew what he wanted to do but he had no idea what would happen when he did it. Once Ludo had his hands in place, Hoggle sucked in a breath and grasped the amulet where it was adhered to Jareth’s chest, and pulled. It burned his fingers, but he told himself he’d deal with burns later, if there was a later.

The moment he started to pull and pry the golden object away from his master, the air became full of arcane, old, screaming voices, a cacophony of screeching that attacked his ears and made the amulet burn even hotter. The Goblin King’s body followed the pull, back arching, chest rising out of Ludo’s arms, and it was only when Hoggle looked at Jareth’s face that he realized the voice was Jareth’s, or at least it was coming from his mouth. The echoing hell that careened out of the king's throat sounded like all of the creatures of the Labyrinth from time unknown were using his vocal chords to cry out against Hoggle’s efforts to remove the scorching amulet from Jareth’s chest. Later, Hoggle would understand that indeed, that’s exactly what he heard – it was the Labyrinth screaming out against the death of her keeper.

He snatched his hand away from the amulet and tumbled back off the bed. Ludo dropped Jareth back to the mattress in his haste to put his hands over his ears, but the screaming stopped the minute Hoggle’s hands were off the amulet. Jareth’s chest caved downward to the pillows once more, and Ludo pulled his massive hands away from the king and placed them over his ears and rubbed them in circles, as though he needed to be sure the sound was gone. “Loud,” he moaned, and backed away to the wall opposite the side of the bed, where he sank down to the floor.

Hoggle curled in over his arms as he sat on the trunk at the end of the bed, staring at Jareth where he lay with that grimace of pain still covering his face, for how long he wasn’t sure. The sun finished rising and had set by the time he moved to seat himself next to Ludo along the stone wall. Neither said a word. They sat with hands in laps and watched their king, their once-antagonist, the man who held the heart of the girl they both cherished and waited to see if he was healing or dying.

They waited to see if they would heal or die along with him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! I'm glad to be back on track with this story. I finally found the 'hook' for my creative direction and should have this complete [relatively] soon. Grad school kicked my butt last semester and will likely do so again this spring, so I'm going to get as much written over break as possible. Thank you for kudos and comments, they are truly a joy and an inspiration.


	4. Awake

For weeks after he woke up from the fall, Jareth kept to himself, locked away in his quarters at the corner of his castle. He saw enough of the dawn and all of the sunset, it made him aware of the hours between each and how they dragged on and ached in his bones. He painted her face everywhere. The walls of his rooms were covered by images of her mouth, of her hair blowing in the wind at the top of a dusty hill, brick after brick was occupied by all the different ways her eyes had gazed upon him. He was only vaguely aware of his people and the land that surrounded the maze, he knew that they could lead themselves for the time of his mourning. He flew over the lands nightly, practically unseeing, and only the most obvious activity drew his attention: a detachment of combat goblins marching off the the east, a construction group working in the Bog under the direction of Sir Didymus.

He began to summon images of her friends in his isolated chambers. He watched them closely, and analyzed their grief. He watched their faces as they thought of their lovely friend and her untimely end. When he watched Ludo and Hoggle his chest would become oddly tight, yet hollow, and the amulet would briefly flare with heat. It still hurt him to breathe, and the red scorches of his veins had yet to fully fade. While the feathers from his owl form had finally shed themselves a few days after he awoke, he still looked the part of a feral animal on the hunt, hungry, but never finding its prey.

As the days grew into weeks, he found in himself a growing hatred and resentment for the three creatures most loyal to his dead beloved. Each thought of them, each vision, each stolen moment of witness to their continued existence fed his fire. He began to wonder why they should be allowed to live, when the most important life of all had been taken, when he had proven unable to follow her soul into the dark. He became cold. He stopped eating. And in the silky flowing lines between his palms and his fingers, he conjured crystals, and he thought on what he still needed to do.

__

One morning, the sun rose red in the sky, and Jareth rose with it. He watched it come up and up, burning its way above the eastern horizon, felt the warmth on his face as a fever; this was the day to begin. The sailors' rhyme bespoke of caution upon a sunrise such as this, and his land-loving people were just as superstitious. They were right to believe in such things.

For the first time in days, he bathed and dressed himself in clean clothes. Black breeches and black shirt, a jerkin and tall riding boots of maroon leather. He summoned Hoggle to his quarters. When the little man arrived, he looked only mildly shocked at the state of his master's rooms; Jareth's rages and stretches of solitude had been known to him for some time. He hadn't always been a lowly gatekeeper.

“Your orders, sir?” The dwarf stood still, hands clasped behind his back, head bowed.

“Yes. It is time to do a little... cleaning up around here. I will be at the viaduct site for most of the day. I want this room restored to… normalcy when I return.”

Hoggle glanced around, seeing all of the detritus left in the wake of the King's sorrow. He gazed openly at all of the paintings on the walls. The pictures were so beautiful, Sarah's face was everywhere, and he started sniffling a bit before he could stop himself.

“Is there a problem?” Jareth said, loud enough to make the dwarf jump with fright. Hoggle gulped before asking the necessary question.

“Um, sir... Is you wanting the walls cleaned, too?” Hoggle kept his eyes to the floor, willed his nose to stop running. Clearly, Jareth was not feeling sympathetic, not that such an emotion had been expected.

Jareth inhaled sharply at that, flexing his fingers at his sides, and a small spark of energy shot from his left hand to a pile of soiled laundry in the corner. A flame quickly shot up, leading Hoggle to grab Jareth's water jug and dump it on the clothes. He stamped on them for good measure before looking up at the king.

Jareth's gaze was bright and hard, and Hoggle quickly looked back down at the floor. “Yes, Hoggle. I want it all washed away. I don't care what you… Yes. Just get rid of them. I want them all gone by sundown.” With that, he walked to the chamber door, pulling on a pair of black gloves as he went. At the doorway, he spun around. “And Hoggle?”

Braving eye contact, the dwarf looked up at the Goblin King. Those mismatched eyes made him wish he hadn't. They were full of anger like Hoggle hadn't seen in an age. He blinked twice and cleared his throat. “Yes, your majesty?”

“I'd like to have a small supper with you tonight, in this chamber. Have the kitchen make whatever you like. And have the cook bring up a bottle of the four-score mead.”

“Yes, sir.” Hoggle didn't let his surprise show in his voice.

“I'll have you bring it an hour after sunset.”

“Yes, your majesty.”

And with that, Jareth was gone.

**Author's Note:**

> I have a slight obsession with story ideas that open with Sarah either dead or dying... this is the first one I've attempted to actually write. I've been out of the fan fic game for a few years. but now that I've finally finished my degree, and since most of us are stuck at home due to SARS-CoV-2, I think it's time to get back on the horse.
> 
> please give your kudos, or - if you're feeling especially friendly - leave a comment! they are both joy and fuel, and it gives me a chance to appreciate every one of you individually. <3


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